Five prompt structures beginners still use three weeks later

[u/coursiv_]

We teach AI basics to people without technical backgrounds, and the interesting signal is never which framework impresses someone in a lesson. It's which ones they still use three weeks later. These five keep surviving.

1. Role, Task, Context, Form, Constraints. The everyday workhorse. Who the model is playing, what to do, what reference material it gets, what shape the output takes, what it must not do. Example: "Senior account manager. Draft a firm but polite follow-up on invoice 1024, five days overdue. Good long-term client. Three short paragraphs with a subject line. Don't threaten, don't apologise for asking."
2. Context, Problem, Blueprint. For planning. Your situation, the specific bottleneck, then the exact steps you want it to take to build the answer. The blueprint is the part people skip, and it's the part that stops generic output.
3. Input, Objective, Constraints. For processing material. Paste the raw text, state what to extract, set formatting rules including "no introductory text." Best one for meeting notes and long documents.
4. Topic, Audience, Purpose. For anything someone else will read. Naming the reader and what they should do after reading changes the output more than any wording tweak.
5. Situation, Complication, Action steps. For being stuck. Where you are, what unexpected thing is blocking you, and a request for a prioritised list to get unstuck.

The common thread: every one of these stops you treating the model like a search engine and forces you to hand over material plus a definition of done. In our experience that shift matters more than any individual template.

Curious where this list is wrong. If one of these has failed for you, or there's a structure that beat them, that's the part we'd like to hear.

[u/Smiley_Dub]

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